| dc.description.abstract | The shifting perceptions of public management - from concepts of public
administration to those of business management - originated in the market
ideology, style and public expenditure objectives of the Thatcher
administration, and is a trend that has been globalized. This was as a result
of the continuos decline of Britain's economic performance that reached its
lows in the 1970's. Almost all countries in the world faced with a declining
public sector performance now follow the British lead in privatizing their
public sector.
Other bold attempts to improve the reach and effectiveness of the public
sector have been experimented. Such include importing and adapting
techniques from the private sector into the public institutions considered as
a move strong enough to revitalize the public sector to make it survive to
carry out its important tasks.
In Kenya, the deterioration of the public services over the years calls for reengineering
of the public' sector management. The need for applying
private sector strategies to the public sector operations such as education,
health, water, electricity, and information management e.t.c cannot be
over-emphasized. There is therefore need to explore the experience of both
the developed and developing countries on the evolution of the public
services management over time.
Kenya has been in a continuous engagement to privatize its public
institutions in an effort to change the management of public sector. This
privatisation process has been slow due to political and technical hitches.
From the onset, Kenya was deficient in manpower resources to implement
the privatisation programme. This combined with strong political
interference (politicians have used the opportunity to take full ownership
of some institutions in an irregular fashion) have resulted in stalled
privatisation processes.
This paper is an attempt to fill the information gap on whether the public
services can be managed as in the private sector to achieve the desired level
of efficiency. And if that is the case, can private driven systems deliver a
system of equity and universal access, which are key principles of the
public sector systems? To answer these pertinent questions, the paper
begins with an assessment of the conceptual framework of public
management as a discipline, and the constraints of the public sector
environments that may influence the success of recent policy initiatives to
revitalize the sector.
This paper study tries to find out whether the private sector management
strategies can be adopted in the management of public services, establish
whether the adoption of private sector management strategies will lead to
improvements in the management of the public services to achieve
efficiency and high productivity. | en |
